Truth Machines: The Political Economy of Command and Control

This article looks at the socio-economic context of Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", and interrogates the technological underpinning of the shift from discipline to control in the centres of advanced capitalism. The paper argues that developments in computer science and cybernetics in the first half of the twentieth century led to a cybernetic capitalism in which statistics, probability, and binary logic create a "post-truth" which serves to structure the self-control and self-regulation of docile subjects. In the end, it argues for a reclamation of "democratic excess" as a means to regain agency and the full richness of the human experience of truth. This article is a pre-print.